Parkable: The quicker you can learn the better

Auckland-based Parkable started out in 2015 as Airbnb for car parking, an app-based marketplace where individuals could list their private parking spaces and others could rent them. But like many startups, as it found its product-market fit and scaled, Parkable has pivoted its business model. Now, the startup is a B2B SaaS player, providing employers with car park management software for employees.

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For Parkable, that fortuitous shift happened almost by accident. The startup had originally pitched Datacom, an IT consultancy firm with offices around the city, on listing its car parks on the Parkable marketplace during nights and weekends. Datacom counter-pitched them. The company was consolidating its office space into a building in the Viaduct, where it would only have 400 car parks – not enough for its 700 employees. Could Parkable instead help Datacom figure out how to allocate parking fairly and dynamically?

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“We built that product for them to help them manage their own private car park, and that was our first SaaS customer,” Byron Powell, Parkable’s chief revenue officer, tells Caffeine. “And that’s the product we’ve been taking around the world.”

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Today, Parkable has brought its parking solutions management software to eight countries, including the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, Malta and Luxembourg, and offers its services to big names like Meta, KPMG, Siemens and Dentsu Aegis. The startup has 56 employees across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US, where Powell has helped set up an American headquarters in Denver, Colorado.

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We sat down with Powell to learn about how Parkable went from a Kiwi-based consumer product to a SaaS product used by the top dogs in Silicon Valley.

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Software review sites

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Car park management software for employers wasn’t exactly a booming industry back when Parkable was starting up. By getting the app on software review sites like G2 and Capterra early, Parkable didn’t need to get that many reviews to be number one or two in the world – a spot that the startup has since been able to maintain, says Powell.

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Without having to “spend a whole lot on SEO and ads”, Parkable’s reviews secured it its first overseas clients.

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“If you’re kind of early stage and you’re in quite an early category, even if you’re not looking to sell overseas, it can be quite a good idea to get on those review sites very early because it can get you some early wins,” says Powell.

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Taking an 11-city US tour

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Parkable had early success attracting customers through inbound, but the next question was, do you scale that? And how do you do it in a massive market like the US without spending loads of money?

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“You can't really go do a national PR thing there with New Zealand dollars. You need to choose an area.”

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So the startup sent its CEO, Toby Littin, on an 11-city tour across the US to see what parking was like on the ground and meet with stakeholders and prospective clients. Littin met with a combination of city officials and representatives from existing global clients, like PwC. The tour ended up ruling out New York City, where there were too few available parking spaces for corporates, and Houston, where there was basically a 1:1 relationship between the number of desks and car parks.

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Once Parkable had a feel for the US, the startup asked NZTE to help it commission market research from UCLA, wherein a group of MBA students take the problem you’re trying to solve and essentially do a project on it. They determine which conferences are best for your startup to attend, how to take your product to market in the US, which markets you should go to, and which to target first.

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Powell said that information helped inform Parkable’s next trip into the US to narrow that focus.

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A “six-week powerhouse”

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“The constant journey of the startup is to forget to narrow your focus, especially when entering a massive market like America,” says Powell.

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So the team decided to do a “six-week powerhouse”, which involved its CEO, international growth lead and sales development representative choosing six verticals to target – like business parks, associations, and multi-family housing companies. They were testing the top of the funnel – sending out emails, doing phone outreach, going to conferences, setting up sales demos –  to identify which verticals would allow Parkable to scale up its outbound go-to-market.

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Powell says this exercise was helpful in facilitating a mental shift to make a more niche product in the US.

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“In New Zealand, you could never make money just selling to associations or business parks or only one vertical,” he says.

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Those three market-targeting exercises were spread out over about a year-and-a half, says Powell. He notes that back in New Zealand, Parkable put in interim reporting lines so that the three executives it sent to the US only had to focus on learning.

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“I’d recommend that to anyone going up to the US. Just say, ‘okay, we’re gonna send a few people, do some rapid-fire sprints on what works and test some things out to get that learning really quickly’,” he says. “Funding US expansion on the New Zealand dollar is expensive, and the quicker you can learn, the better. Time is always your enemy.”

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When the time came to move into US markets quickly, Parkable knew it needed to set up a headquarters in the country. It needed a region with decent crossover hours with New Zealand, but the west coast is expensive and it would be impossible to attract talent in the Valley with New Zealand dollars. In the end, Parkable settled on Colorado, where there’s already a surprisingly large number of New Zealand companies.

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No doubt the other New Zealand businesses saw what Parkable saw. Colorado is well populated with people aged 30 and under who are culturally similar to Kiwis. The lifestyle is great and nature-focused. And the state is set up with welcoming programmes and accelerators to help new businesses get established, find mentors and develop relationships, according to Powell.

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Learning from other Kiwi companies

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Moving a business to the US involves a ton of logistics. How much do we pay people? How much will it cost to move people over? What’s the best visa to get? How do we arrange healthcare for people who are moving overseas?

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“There are so many mini-decisions,” says Powell. “The best way to deal with that is to be around companies or have mentors who have done it just before you. We got so much advice from New Zealand companies that are just slightly ahead of us. It just speeds up all those decisions that aren’t really helping you crack a market.”

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Powell also says a lot of the expertise Parkable has acquired for scaling internationally came from one of its board members, Bruce Gordon, former CEO of Pushpay and chairman of Paymark.

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“If you can get that person on right from the start – someone who’s scaled overseas before – that would be amazing,” says Powell.

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